Outraged by the decision of HSBC to close the accounts of clients who may be at risk of laundering money, evading sanctions, or financing terrorism, one of the trustees of the Ummah Welfare Trust (UWT) has called for a boycott by “Muslim brothers and sisters” and “their contacts” against the British bank.

The Federation of Student Islamic Societies also condemned the closure, saying it sets the precedent that such accounts can be “closed, without reason, at any time.” The Daily Mailnotes that several Muslim Britons have taken to social media outlets to call HSBC’s decision “racist,” while the targets of the closures have blamed “Islamophobia.”

These knee-jerk and vitriolic responses are similar to the reaction of prominent individuals like Olympic medalist Mo Farah, who claimed that an attempt by Barclays to end a business relationship with one remittance company last year could mean “death to millions of Somalis,” and from U.S. Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) who screamed, “It’s wrong to close off the lifeline!” during a protest against banks in Minnesota that ceased remittance services to Somalia in late 2011.

Can we not have a civil and intelligent conversation about why the accounts have been closed, and what regulatory pressures brought this to bear, without spoiling for a confrontation and casting HSBC’s leaders as a bunch of ignorant bigots?

The targets of the closures purport to be upset that they were not given an adequate explanation for the account closures. But that’s a catch-22. If HSBC had disclosed the reasons for its suspicions—if hypothetically it had said that UWT operates two programs in Gaza that are administered by Hamas operatives—then UWT would probably claim that the disclosure was baseless and defamatory, and that the matter should have been handled in private.

Or if HSBC had maintained the accounts, HSBC’s leadership would be hauled before Congress again and asked to explain why it still operated accounts on behalf of controversial entities like the Finsbury Park mosque and UWT.

This is a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and damned for the manner in which you did or didn’t do it.

Iran manufactures missiles, loads them up at its Bandar Abbas port, ships them to Sudan, where they are transported by ground to the Sinai for final transfer through smuggling tunnels to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

Smuggling was rampant particularly when the Muslim Brotherhood controlled Egypt under Muhammad Morsi, making a significant contribution to Hamas’s 10,000 missile stockpile. “Under Morsi it was almost a highway,” said one observer.

Shorter-range missiles are built in Gaza itself. Technical expertise lent by Iran is helping develop Hamas’s homegrown rocket program, although even as recently as two years ago one analyst observed that Hamas lacks the capacity within Gaza to build a banana plantation, much less a missile factory.

Some missiles, such as the M-302, are manufactured by Syria “under license” from China, which designed it. Assad would not be able to produce these weapons or remain in power without Iranian backing in the first place.

The seizure of a statue by Hamas worth $20 to $40 million is raising concerns within the art world that looted antiquities could become a growing revenue source for terrorist organizations. The bronze statue in question was allegedly discovered underwater (which expert archaeologists doubt) by a Gaza Strip fisherman and subsequently taken possession of by Hamas.

The dubious sea-diving tale prompts the question raised by the archaeological blog Looting Matters: “Is the reported find-spot a blind to distract the authorities from a ‘productive’ site?” In other words, where in the Middle East is the real site of discovery that is being plundered and resold to organizations like Hamas?

Incidentally, had this been a “Gazan” or “Palestinian” artifact discovered off the Gulf coast of Mississippi, the Palestinian Authority and leftist academics would be calling for the “repatriation” of the artifact to the Palestinian territories. Yet notice that although this is a Greek artifact, there isn’t even a hint of a possibility of returning the statue to Greece…

Rare Bronze Apollo Statue Found In The Gaza Strip, ‘Priceless’ Artifact Could Become ‘Funding Stream’ For Hamas

By Zoe Mintz

on February 10 2014

A statue lost for centuries was found in the Gaza Strip, seized by police and has since disappeared from public view.

The statue of the Greek god Apollo is at least 2,000 years old – made sometime between the 5th and 1st centuries BC. Joudat Ghrab, 26, a local fisherman, said he saw the half-ton statue on the seafloor of the Mediterranean in August and brought it home. The statue was posted on eBay briefly for $500,000 – well below its estimated value of $20 million to $40 million — before it was taken by the Islamist group Hamas, Reuters reports.

“It’s unique. In some ways I would say it is priceless. It’s like people asking what is the [value] of the painting La Gioconda [the Mona Lisa] in the Louvre museum,” Jean-Michel de Tarragon, a historian with the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem, said. “It’s very, very rare to find a statue which is not in marble or in stone, but in metal.”

While archeologists have yet to examine the rare statue firsthand, based on the images that show the statue was well-preserved, experts say it was most likely recovered on land, not in the sea.

“This wasn’t found on the seashore or in the sea … it is very clean. No, it was [found] inland and dry,” de Tarragon said about the six-foot-tall statue, adding that the metal would have been disfigured or barnacles present if it had been found in water…

But Ghrab defends his story, adding that he thought the statue was a badly burned body before he dove down and discovered it was actually a “treasure”…

Family members belonging to Hamas soon took possession of the statue. Officials from Gaza’s tourism ministry told Reuters the statue will not be displayed publicly until a criminal investigation is completed on who tried to sell the item online…

The Apollo statue is stuck in a bit of a quandary. The Gaza Strip, a coastal Palestinian territory, is controlled by the militant Islamist group Hamas – making the purchase of the Apollo statue limited since it would be considered violating international sanctions against financing terrorism, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports. If the statue was smuggled, it would be a challenge. The Gaza Strip not only shares heavily armed borders with Israel and Egypt but its coastline is also under heavy guard by the Israeli Navy. If the statue remains in the Gaza Strip, it would not become a tourist attractio [sic], because Hamas’ fundamentalist principles condemn nudity.

“This case is fiendishly difficult,” Sam Hardy, a British archaeologist who runs the website Conflict Antiquities, said. “National and international laws make it difficult to assist the administration in the West Bank, let alone that in the Gaza Strip. Indeed, any sale or leasing of the statue might normalize looting of antiquities as a funding stream for Hamas.”